WhatsApp looks to be keen on expanding its broadcasting features on the platform by introducing yet another feature, “newsletter”.
A feature with such a name has shown up in test versions of the app as seen by WhatsApp watcher WABetaInfo a few days ago.
As the test name hints (no one is sure if that will end up being the final launch name of the feature), the feature is expected to function more or less like how newsletters do: a one-to-many broadcasting tool.
WhatsApp already allows users to broadcast to others by various means. Its latest attempt, Communities, has been received well and it may have urged on Meta’s app to proceed and introduced more such-like. This is coming at a time when other social-centred applications like Twitter are purging newsletter-related features.
While the implementations of newsletters that we know tend to be very public, WhatsApp is said to be making its newsletter feature but still maintaining the privacy of the users of the app. Newsletters will be available privately to individuals and, while their contents won’t be encrypted like normal chats and calls within the app, their owners won’t be able to see details of their subscribers like their phone numbers. The same way, newsletter subscribers won’t be able to see the phone number of the creator.
“Newsletters will be a separate and optional section available within the Status tab which is separate from private chats, and will not affect the end-to-end encryption of private messaging,” notes WABetaInfo.
It is still early days and, like with many other features that we have seen WhatsApp testing, the newsletter feature may make it to our phones one day or just disappear into thin air. We can guess that all of this is related to how WhatsApp processes the feedback it gets during this testing period. The feature has popped up in version 2.23.5.3 of the app which is rolling out through the Google Play Store Beta Program.
